Chris Christie attack ad from 1994 a blast from the past: Mulshine

"It turned out to be the worst mistake I ever made in politics, because he had ticked off so many people." - Rick Merkt on his run with Christie

I like to say that the unique thing about the Bridgegate scandal is that it represents the first time in political history that Chris Christie got into a big fight with a Democrat rather than a Republican.

That's not strictly true, of course, but the governor does have a habit of tussling more with members of his own party than with the opposition.

See the video above that includes a 1994 attack ad that led two Republicans to file a libel suit against Christie. A later race brought another Republican-vs.-Republican suit, this time with Christie as plaintiff.

The reporters quote many of the guys I have on speed dial, including political consultant Rick Shaftan, former Assemblyman Rick Merkt and former Morris County Democratic chairman Paul Bangiola.

Here's a passage in which Bangiola comments on Christie and the Republican stranglehold on county politics:

In 1994, he ran for the office of freeholder, New Jersey’s equivalent of a county commissioner. In a deep-red county, the race that mattered was the GOP primary.

“There was one elected Democrat in the 20th century. Watergate. There was a one-term Democratic freeholder elected in the Watergate era. . . . He was out the next time,” said Paul Bangiola, who ran the county’s hapless Democratic Party from 1998 to 2002. “We have what is actually the strongest, most unified, most intact political machine in the United States. It just happens to be a Republican machine, where people have whales on their ties.”

So perhaps it's not all that unusual that our governor's campaign would run aground on the reefs of his effort to get the endorsement of Democratic mayors.

And then there's this passage in which Merkt recounts his history with Christie after the newly elected freeholder made a decision to immediately run for state Assembly:

But Christie continued to make enemies outside the chamber, by starting a new campaign just months after the old one ended. He ran for the state assembly, teaming up with another local Republican, Rick Merkt (in New Jersey, each assembly district elects two representatives).

“It turned out to be the worst mistake I ever made in politics, because he had ticked off so many people,” Merkt says now. “We got shellacked.”

That 1995 campaign fizzled in part because of lingering anger over the 1994 ad. Although New Jersey politics is famous for its eye-gouging tactics, some parts of Jersey are less Jersey than others. Morris County is one of those places. Republicans there were still mad at what Christie had done.

“It was considered below the belt. I don’t think it was below the belt,” said Rick Shaftan, a hard-bitten New Jersey political consultant who worked for one of Christie’s opponents in that race. Although the ad didn’t bother Shaftan, he knew it bothered others, and he crafted ads that showed Christie as a “career politician” grappling in a mud pit.

Read the whole thing. It gives a good look about the early days of Christie's career.

And it's interesting to get a look at how Christie looked 20 years ago in that ad.

The piece also gives you an idea of how much attention the Beltway media are paying to this scandal.